What if all wine, coffee or beer tasted the same?

Oh yes, there’s a time and place for the kind of predictability you get from a familiar taste (and / or buzz) experience.

But just as wine and coffee and beer have evolved to be all about taste and terroir, so is chocolate—thanks to the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund (HCP).

A group of chocolate industry veterans started the HCP in a quest to save interestingly flavored cacao varieties from going extinct, much as Slow Food’s Ark of Taste does the same for other foods around the world. Like many of these efforts to save heirloom foods, this project has some great side effects not only for craft chocolate lovers but for farmers in cacao-growing regions.